Essential collaboration skills for contributing to open source software
BSSw Fellow Leah Wasser is creating a multi-lesson self-paced online module that teaches the often-missed technical and social collaboration skills needed to contribute to open source software (OSS). The focus of these lessons is on the skills that will make the experience of OSS contributors more positive and constructive. This information will also make it easier for volunteer maintainers to work with and help OSS contributors.
Areas of social focus include using constructive and specific language and code examples that simplify problem solving, building trust with volunteer maintainers, providing reproducible code for bug reports, and referencing issue history when submitting bugs.
The workshop will also cover fundamental GitHub collaboration skills, including forking, cloning, and pull requests. The workshop will also cover effective code review. These lessons will be integrated into pyOpenSci's online mentored sprints and tutorials, providing a platform for hands-on learning and real-time engagement.
Leah is the executive director and founder of pyOpenSci --- an organization that is building a diverse community that supports the open source tools that are driving open science. She has taught data intensive science for about 20 years, with the last 10 devoted to open source software. Previously, Leah developed an earth analytics education program at the University of Colorado - Boulder. This program included both a professional graduate program in earth data analytics and a program that built capacity for tribal colleges to teach data science using open source tools. She also built the Data Skills program at the National Ecological Observatory network. In her free time Leah can be found on mountain trails with her pup.
